Ex-health secretary Jeremy Hunt has told members of the House of Lords on the Adult Social Care Committee that Covid-19 backlog plans will fail unless the social care crisis is fixed.

“The reforms everyone wants for the NHS will just fall over unless we address the issues in social care,” Hunt said, warning that doctors will be unable to operate if the waiting list of beds can’t be freed up by discharging into the social care sector due to a shortage of carers.

Each hospital bed blocked costs the NHS about £400 a day, with almost 1.75 million days lost in the year to February 2020 in England to ‘delayed transfers of care’. About half of delays are caused by a lack of ongoing care for the patient, either because there is no available place in a residential or care home or because a home-help package has not been arranged. 

To counteract this, experts say the social care sector, which includes 1.6million workers, needs 490,000 more staff by 2035 to keep up with demands in the sector.

“I think we need to win the argument, which I don’t think we have yet,” added Hunt, “that there really isn’t any point in having a big Covid-19 backlog plan if you can’t get beds for people who need operations because they can’t be discharged into the social care sector.”